


The Halcyon Weekly Reading Society

by snaildetective



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Eventual Romance, Explicit Language, F/F, False Identity, Industrial Capitalism, Light-Hearted, Original Character(s), Recreational Drug Use, Reluctant Protagonist, Sexual Content, book clubs, i think
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:01:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26715688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snaildetective/pseuds/snaildetective
Summary: Saved from seven decades of cryosleep, purloined from her colony ship, and spirited away to a strange new planet in order to conduct her mysterious benefactor's schemes - none of the adventure serials in the world could have prepared Juno for this situation. But maybe Captain Alex Hawthorne can handle it.
Relationships: Female Captain/Nyoka (The Outer Worlds), The Captain/Nyoka (The Outer Worlds)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 10





	1. Our Heroine Finds Herself Marooned

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: this story will be unrepentantly goofy, but hopefully fun too. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

_He had come upon this strange continent as a man of five and thirty, an age remarkably well-suited to such adventures. For a man in the thirtieth year of his life is not so green as to wonder wide-eyed and dumbfounded at the world around him, and not so polished as to become fixed in his ways as senescent men are wont to do. No, dear readers: Captain Bartleby was in the prime of his years, disposed neither to haste nor lethargy, and thankfully so, for he’d found himself on the shores of a great unknown land in want of crew and provisions, and with no immediate means of obtaining either._

_\- The Strange Adventures of Arthur Bartleby, vol. I,_ by H.S. Carton

* * *

Juno crumpled against the battered metal of her escape pod in a fetal desperation that could be possessed only by a creature wholly convinced it was on the brink of quitting this world. She slowly ate from the chalky taupe protein bar she'd found inside the wreck, gaze numbly fixed on the distance in exhaustion, hand moving to mouth in morose autopilot. The light had long drained from the sky, and the dark mountains and long swishing grass were all that she could make out of this unfamiliar landscape. She'd stopped trying to find her way out of the rocky pass and now leaned back against the pod, showing her belly to fate. It appeared that Alex Hawthorne was not going to be saving the day, or her, or anything else for that matter. 

As she ate, she thought about all the ways she might possibly die tonight. Starvation was looking to be the likely contender. With wobbling knees, she’d ransacked all the provisions stored on the ship - a few of these graying protein bricks were all she found. That would last her a couple weeks, give or take, and then she’d wither away and die. She’d heard growling in the distance earlier in the evening, so maybe there were some wild animals that might rip her apart and eat her and then she’d die.

She pictured them chewing on her arm, and a shudder ran through her body. Oh, hopefully they’d kill her quick; if she were really so lucky, they'd eat her face first. 

There was always explosive cell death to look forward to. Mr. Welles had been very emphatic on that point. As her mind fell upon the relish with which he'd pronounced the phrase "organ liquefaction," the world started to seesaw around her, and suddenly she felt very faint. 

It had taken her until the third hour of isolation or so to realize that all her family was dead now. Her hysteria had subsided somewhat, and she was combing over the fragmented events of the past day - _hibernation sickness, the Board, seventy years -_

Seventy years. Her mother was gone, surely, as was her father. She held her breath as she tried to work the math out for the remaining members of her family - little Emma was eleven when she left. Now, her younger sister would be eighty-one, and to Juno, that might as well have been as preposterous as a thousand years old. People like them didn't live that long, and she let go of that little spark of hope much more quietly than it had first inflamed in her heart. 

The shock made her unable to feel much grief. It was like when Teófila died. One moment, Juno had been walking home from the store, intent on putting away what little food she'd bought and sinking into a chair after a long day on her feet, and the next moment, the company police were on their doorstep, saying phrases like _malfunctioning gear_ and _crushed beyond recognition_ and _not_ _liable for bodily harm_ that translated to _your big sister is dead._

As the police dropped a stack of forms on their kitchen table, requesting her parents' signatures, all she could think about was that earlier in morning was the last time she would ever see her sister again. They'd bickered - Juno had worn her work shirt and tossed it over the back of a chair instead of washing it like she promised. She'd snapped at Teo in irritation. They didn't kiss each other on the cheek before she left, a quick and unthinking gesture they exchanged almost every day - but not that one. Juno dropped her head to her knees. She should have washed her shirt. 

The recollection shamed her to look back upon, but those first few days after her death had been ones of hushed kitchen conversations and groans of despair rather than the full hues of heartbreak. Her parents weren't sure what they'd do without her income from operating elevators. She was bright; her industriousness had often kept the family afloat in thinner-than-usual times. She was good-hearted, too, a bit mischievous, but mourning her personal qualities had to take an initial backseat to more practical matters of arranging their continued survival. 

Some years prior, Teófila had gotten Juno a job at the RayCorp-Trustfield Plaza Towers Complex and taught her everything she knew about elevator operation: how to dress, how to stand, how to speak just enough to take direction, but not enough to draw any attention to herself. The elevators could run automatically, but the people who worked in the building liked having a real-live attendant. They found it utterly charming, and sometimes pressed a credit or two into Juno's hand with magnanimous smiles and exhortations not to spend it all in one place.

The Diagnostic Exam said they had "uncongenial, cheerless features," and neither of the Ortega de Cassini sisters were much disposed to customer service. Teófila liked working at the Plaza because she was singularly passionate about elevators, every bit of them: how they were programmed, how the pulleys functioned; and so she worked hard in hopes that one day, she might be hired to fix the contraptions instead of merely pushing buttons, and as with most things, Juno followed her. 

The grief would follow later, too. She already knew that from experience. 

“Hello?” The man’s voice rang out from the communication panel - it was the man who’d woken her up. For the past six hours, her mind had turned through a revolving door of opinions regarding him. After the first hour, she’d thought him a terrible criminal who’d thrown her unwitting into this crisis. But right now, hearing his voice was the sweetest relief she’d ever known. She dropped the protein bar and scrambled around to the cockpit.

“Hello?” 

“Please help me, please.” Her fingers were shaking as she switched the receiver on. “I can’t find the captain, I’ve been waiting for hours - “

“Slow down. You say Alex didn’t meet you?”

“No,” she wailed into the speaker. “I’ve been here the whole time. He’s not here.” 

“Hm.” On his side of the line came the clacking of buttons. “It appears you landed perfectly on top of the beacon. I can’t imagine wh - “ He stopped. “Oh, what in Law’s name?”

“What?"

“Check the ship carefully. Go around starboard.” 

She halted; and then, of all things, a recollection of the _The Calamitous Corsair_ flashed through her mind. It ran for a whole year in the company paper, and it was one of her regular serials. She used to sneak the fiction columns into the elevator at work, and sit cross-legged on the floor to read because the attendants were forbidden chairs. Management said standing made them look more "attendant." But her mind scrolled back through those pages of naval battles and swordfights: _starboard_ \- to pirates, that meant the left side. She struggled to her feet and rounded the metal capsule. It took her a few seconds to notice the problem, but when she did, her stomach turned in horror. 

A rigid clawed hand stuck out from underneath the cockpit, grasping at nothing in the final throes of death. Juno turned away, tasting pennies in the back of her throat. 

“That idiot,” the man grumbled. “I told him to place the beacon away from himself - oh, never mind.” 

She just killed a man, her mind raced. Dead. He was dead. She was a murderer. A criminal. She was going to get in trouble and the police would show up and she’d go to jail forever and have to join a prison gang with all sorts of unsavory characters and probably have to eat rats without any kind of seasoning at all - 

With every atom of her being, she wished she’d never left her planet. All the adrenaline coursing through her veins made her frantic. Right now, she couldn’t even remember why she’d decided to go, but she was very, very sorry, and she’d do anything to take it back. 

“Listen to me, Jenny - “ 

“It’s Juno,” she nearly sobbed. 

“No matter. Juno, you need to find Hawthorne’s ship - “ 

“I want to go home,” she croaked.

“My dear, I’m afraid that’s not a possibility at this point,” he said. “So let’s keep our chin up, yes?” 

Her heart slammed against the cage of her chest in protest. The penny taste still lingered on her tongue, but the wind hit her from up the mountain, and the fresh scent of cold air mixed with something similar to the acid smell of household cleaner reminded her that she could breathe. 

“All right.” Her voice was shaky, but she still managed to speak. She had to find a way out of here, even if it was simply to find a comfortable bed she could collapse on and cry into. She didn't want to die tonight. Whatever unknown perils lay beyond the mountains, she would have to meet them head-on. 

“You’ll want to find Hawthorne’s ship. I’m beaming the directions to you now.” 

He continued speaking, and she tried her best to follow along with his hurried instructions as she threw anything within arm’s reach into her flight suit. Food, water. A few tools and wires she’d dug out of the ship’s hold. With great displeasure, she pried loose the unfortunate Captain Hawthorne's pistol for her own use. She'd never wielded a weapon in her life, and handled the thing with some distaste and much fear.

At the last moment, as she was sweeping the wreckage of her escape pod, her eyes fell upon the ratty yellowed paperback she’d stashed away, dog-eared and creased from handling. She remembered walking into the processing center on the day she'd boarded the colony ship, nervous and excited. The instructions said not to bring any personal effects, but she’d wedged the tome into her coat pocket, figuring nobody ever went wrong by bringing a book.

The figure on the weathered cover stood broad-shouldered and bold, planted upon a rocky surface teeming with fantastical flora and fauna. His sailor's oilskin was trim, fluttering in the wind behind him as he surveyed the horizon with a spyglass. For her meager inventory, she'd opted for entertainment over edification: it was one of those trashy serialized novels printed into one volume. She ate up the installments as fast as they were published, so she scoured for bound collections whenever she could find them. One of the girls who worked at the Towers had traded it to her for a copy of a newly-published romance novel which all the papers were calling scandalous, but Juno had found disappointingly chaste.

Newly-published, she'd thought, as if she was still anchored to the typical passing of days. That other novel she'd queued for and bought a couple weeks ago was now seventy years old, and if Juno's literary taste was aligned with that of her fellow citizens, had probably been relegated to the dustbin of history like everything else she'd once known.

She tucked the old paperback into the large pocket on her hip, unwilling to leave it behind. They were the only two things here on this new planet so hopelessly lost out of time. The night air was cool and promising and dreadful all at once as Juno zipped up her flight suit and started walking toward the ship. 


	2. "Alas," Said the Mouse, "the World Gets Smaller Every Day"

Juno fancied herself a polite person, if not necessarily always a kind one. Once she'd believed herself to be very generous, as if it were a fixed and unmalleable quality, but as she’d grown older, she’d come to the realization that she was not such an unending well of sympathy as she’d once believed. She usually looked away when she passed a beggar on the street, less out of distaste than out of some kind of fear at witnessing such a naked display of unfairness in the world. When her coworkers cried in front of her, breaking down with some admission of marital troubles or a sick child or problems within the family, she’d offered the barest and most perfunctory of comforts, with one eye on the clock to mind when she had to return to her shift. Nature had not made her cold; she’d simply grown into numbness.

But on the day she finally staggered past the creaking gates of Edgewater and burst into the doctor’s office, covered in dirt and some foul violet liquid that must have been canid blood, brandishing the pistol she’d unfortunately had to use on her journey there, she was feeling decidedly less than polite. 

“Hi.” She clutched the countertop, which the startled doctor eased behind, as if to place a barrier between himself and this wild-eyed intruder. “How do I get out of here?” 

The doctor squinted. 

“Residents aren’t permitted movement without managerial approval - “ 

“I’m not a resident,” she barked. 

“Oh. Well, there’s transport ships’ll bring supplies. One of them might lift you to the Groundbreaker - “ 

“No, I’m trying to get out of here.“ She waved her arms in a large semicircle. “Here. This colony system. I want to go back to Earth.” 

At this point, he was beginning to grow as agitated as she must’ve looked, and tilted his head away in suspicion.

“Are you experiencing some kind of psychiatric distress? Because that’s not covered under your medical privileges - “ 

“I’m distressed, all right.” Her nails dug into the counter, gripping the plastic so hard that the veins threading through her hands rose to prominence under her skin. 

“I don’t know what to tell you. I think you ought to speak to someone with the company.” He grimaced. “Or...maybe our vicar would be better-suited for your needs.” 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she said, even as she got the horrible sinking feeling that it didn't matter in the slightest. “I need to leave.” 

“I’m sorry,” he said, in a manner that did not sound very sorry at all. “But I have nothing else to tell you.” 

She sighed and glanced over shoulder, kneading her hands in worry. 

“You...” He cleared his throat. “You look...bad. You can use that sink back there in the morgue. Wash up, if you'd like."

She took an automaton's steps to the door he was pointing at, and pushed it open. A plastic basin stood in the far corner, and she recoiled as she passed by the dead bodies on slabs, trying not to stare. 

The water was cold. She found a rag - clean, she could only hope - and set about scrubbing away the filth that had accumulated on her face and hands. When she emerged from the morgue, she almost started to feel like a human again. 

"Thanks," she murmured.

"Are you aware there's a twig sticking out of your hair?"

"I am now," she mumbled and rubbed her eyes, blissfully free of dust and grime. The man crossed his arms and cast her a hesitant look. 

"I offer haircuts as well as medical services." He tapped to the sign. "Clinic-slash-barbershop. Would you like me to deal with your - " He grimaced. "Situation?" 

There were so many worries shooting through her mind that it had numbed. Every cell in her body was crying out in vexation until all the wires screamed in harmony and amassed into one sustained field of blankness. Of all things, a haircut should have been last on her mind. 

“Yes,” she said. 

And so she found herself sagging in his faux-leather chair, staring dully at her replica in the wide mirror. 

“This stick appears to have integrated itself structurally into the knotted hair." He lifted the tangled mass of hair up to where she could see it. "I'm going to have to cut it out."

She closed her eyes as a painful wash of helplessness overcame her. There wasn't a single aspect of her life that she had control over anymore. She was illegible. To the people here, she was nothing but a raving madwoman with snarled hair and blood under her fingernails and incoherent ramblings about Earth, a place so distant it might as well have been invented for a make-believe radio program. Fear made her shiver. Her truth didn't make sense here. Suddenly, she'd found herself lost and reeling, disconnected from her reality and planted in another. 

“Take it all off,” she said. 

“Are you sure?” He smoothed out a strand and touched it to her shoulder. “I could leave you some length.”

“Yes.” She stared into her own eyes. “Go ahead and cut it off.” 

He fired up the clippers and scraped them across the side of her head, and she watched as handful after handful of dark hair fell limp onto the floor. 

"So, your accent is very unusual," he commented, and she barely heard him over her skull rattling. "You must be from the other side of the system." 

"I'm from Chicago," she bristled. 

"Oh, yes. Of course. That's the...the moon over by Eridanos, right?" 

She sighed in resignation.

"Uh-huh."

He continued on, making a stray comment here or there, but mostly working in silence. She gripped the arms of the chair and tried to use the first twenty minutes of stillness she'd had in days to figure out where she was possibly supposed to go from here. For a brief silly moment, she convinced herself that he'd never stop snipping the top of her hair this way and that way, and that she'd get to sit in this chair forever. 

“There you go.” He removed the sheet he'd thrown over her body and dusted the hair off her shoulders. Once she looked in the mirror, her initial reaction was shock. Her eyes were hollow and purpled from lack of sleep, and there was a scratch on her cheek that was nastier than she'd originally thought. She barely looked like her own mental conception of herself anymore. 

"Thank you," she said, touching her newly-freed neck. "I like it." 

“That’ll be thirty bits.” He dunked the shears into a suspiciously grimy-looking purple solution sitting on the counter. 

“Thirty what?” 

“Bits.” His eyebrows furrowed. “The things your boss gives you? After you go to work? You do have a job, don’t you?” 

“Well, no.” 

“Don’t you have money?” 

“No.” 

He put his hands on his hips. 

“Do you think I’m running a house of charity for any fallen woman that runs in off the street?” 

“Fallen woman? I'm - Excuse you.” Indignation burned her, and she gripped the arms of the chair. “I thought you were being nice to me.” 

“Nice costs money, just like everything else in this life. There’s no such thing as a free haircut. That was twenty minutes I could have been working, doing very important things that ensure our town continues running. So how am I going to get my bits’ worth?” 

She looked around feebly. 

“I’ll...work,” she said. “You’re a doctor. Don’t you need someone to help you out? Wash...organ pans, maybe?” 

He tapped the comb on the counter, mulling it over. 

“I suppose I could have you do the appendectomies. I detest anything involving bowels.” He shuddered. 

An important stipulation within their handshake agreement: she was to be neither seen nor heard by anyone important in town. 

“If they find me working with an unauthorized assistant, they’ll charge me with a Section 14-1F violation,” he said, with a grave air. “Do you understand? Your very existence is a violation.” 

“All right.” She’d sighed. “Fine. I’ll be quiet as a churchmouse.” 

“As a what-now?” 

“It’s...never mind.” 

It turned out that being a Section 14-1F violation came with a medical gurney to sleep on and breakfast in the mornings - saltuna on an approximation of toast, of course. He’d left her cot in the morgue, but she’d wheeled it out to the corner of the barbershop, refusing to sleep without at least one wall between her and the dead bodies. 

She’d dragged herself up to his room at a late hour of the night after suffering the biting salt air of Edgewater for a few hours. The papery medical gown she’d stolen to sleep in made her look like some horrid sort of specter, and she felt like one, too. 

"Can I have a blanket, please?"

He sat up abruptly, terrified, and she yanked up the baggy scrub pants she'd fished out of a closet. It had been a continual fight to keep them from falling down.

“Absolutely not,” he hissed through the darkness. “Blankets are only to be issued after charting the correct paperwork for sub-normative thermal incidents.” 

“I’ll do all the papers tomorrow,” she pleaded. “Just let me have one blanket, please.” 

“Oh, and if I let you have one, then what? I suppose you’ll want a pillow as well?” 

Late that night she laid in the darkness, staring up at the corrugated ceiling. The cot's screechy metal frame protested every time she rolled over, so she tried not to move too much. She'd almost just physically attacked a man for a pillow, so needless to say despite her dead-tired bodily exhaustion, her mind was still racing. 

She rolled over to her side and clutched her scratchy blanket close and tried to squeeze a tear out, but nothing came. 

To try for a reliable inducement of catharsis, she thought about the commercials back home that featured glassy-eyed animals and saccharine music crooning behind them, imploring the viewers to have pity and donate to these poor wretches. When Juno was young, she’d wanted a kitten so badly. A patchy little tabby had stolen into the alleyway behind their apartment and given birth to a litter of patchy kittens, and Juno and her sister had schemed to adopt one and keep it in their room. Their eventual target was a dark gray creature with wide buttony eyes; the runt of the litter. He was the one who most needed their help. Not very creatively, they called him Smoky.

He was a useless little thing, but they loved him anyway. They'd entertained fantasies of him becoming a productive member of the family - he could catch bugs, after all, or maybe rats when they showed up in the winter. But it was no use. The cat had no killer instinct whatsoever. When stinkbugs crawled across the floor toward him, he'd skitter away in fear.

After a few days, their parents found Smoky and made them turn him outside. She never knew what happened to him. She hoped he was all right, and that he overcame his benign nature and learned how to hunt rats. But even if he had, she reminded herself, he was dead now too. 

She thought about the end of _Tales from the North Sea_ , when the valiant but roguish outlaw sacrificed himself to save his lover, even though she was going to marry someone else. She'd cried buckets at that one when the papers printed the last chapter, but it still wasn’t working.

On to the time in kindergarten when her mother forgot to pick her up from school. She’d waited and waited and waited on the stoop, and to her, it felt like an eternity, and at some point, she realized nobody was coming for her. She didn’t know what they did with children whose parents didn’t want them anymore. Maybe she’d been left outside on purpose like the garbage, and a man in a big truck would come in the morning and toss her in the back. 

She’d resigned herself to her fate, but eventually, she heard the chain-link fence rattling. She’d looked up, and even through her blurry tear-streaked glasses, she could tell it was her sister. She’d snatched her bookbag up and ran to her, on the verge of blubbering again. 

“Juno? Why are you still here? Where's mom?” Teo had her tennis bag slung over her shoulder, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. She pressed against the tall chain-link fence that divided the big kids’ school from the younger kids. 

“They left me,” she tried to say, but what came out was probably closer to a hysterical garble. Teo rattled the fence again, but it was padlocked shut after-hours. So, her sister had hoisted her tennis bag up on her shoulder and clawed her hands in the fence and wedged her white shoe in one of the links. 

“You’ll get in trouble,” Juno cried, but her sister was already on her way up. The fence wobbled and wavered as she scaled it, but she didn't hesitate. Juno watched with terror as she swung a leg over the top and dropped to the ground on the other side, hands blackened with dirt and grease. 

She didn’t understand why back then, but as her sister grabbed her bookbag and her little hand and trudged down the sidewalk, she could sense the rage simmering inside her, and she'd wondered what she'd done so wrong to make everyone mad at her. 

Now, with the sobering ability of hindsight; to look back at a situation, step outside oneself, and into the mind and heart of another, Juno knew her sister hadn't been angry at her. Not at all. It was as unprovable as any article of faith, but she'd swear on her own life that it was true. 

Against the dullness of that smoggy gray evening, she remembered the jeweled trails of blood that slid down her sister’s sun-goldened shins and clotted in the tops of her white tennis socks, fiercely studded with accrued brambles snagged from patches of overgrown weeds as they dodged down the alleyways toward home. 

She curled up against the pillow, shocked at the strength of that recollection. She hadn’t thought about that day in a long, long time, and yet it bubbled up from within some recess of her mind. Still, she had not one single tear to shed for her childhood loneliness, or her sister’s. Maybe that was an effect of being thawed out with whatever chemicals Welles had pumped her with. And at that, and all of the other strange things that might have been happening to her body at that very moment, she certainly wanted to cry, but the inside of her eyeballs felt like glue stiffened and gone tacky. 

She rolled onto her stomach and listened to the noise of Edgewater. A steady low crash beat time on the shoreline far away. There were beds creaking and radios playing and a hundred sighs and groans slipping out of a hundred mouths as shoes dropped to the floor after a long day of work. Finally, against the chorus and plurality of sounds, she was able to forget where she was long enough to find peace in the dark. 

  
  
  


After a week in town, she started to skim along the edges of the streets with familiarity. Sometimes, when she was feeling bold, she even nodded at her neighbors, but most of them kept their eyes fixed on the ground, or glanced away as soon as their gazes chanced to meet. One chilly morning, she pushed open the doors to the saloon and waved at Amelia behind the bar. 

“Hey, could I get a cup of coffee?” Juno asked, and started counting out her bits on the bar. The money here was unusual to her, and she had trouble keeping track of it. Yesterday, she'd accidentally paid a woman double price for a sickly-looking head of cabbage. She was so desperate for anything to eat other than saltuna, even if it was wilting in front of her eyes. The lady hadn't corrected her, and she only realized her mistake when she got home. 

“A cup of huh?” Amelia wrinkled her nose. 

“Coffee?" She repeated, with a distinct note of hope, but the flat look on the woman’s face made her voice fall. “Something to wake me up?” 

“We got stim pills, I guess." 

“Never mind,” Juno muttered. “Thanks anyway. I'll see you around.” 

“Alex,” Amelia called. “Don't come in before eight tonight, okay?” 

“I won't,” she called over her shoulder before she pushed the swinging wooden doors open and stepped out into the salty breeze. She’d been washing dishes for Amelia in exchange for some money - bits - whatever they called it. Just like the clinic, she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Amelia always snuck her out the back door when the night was over. It was preferable to lying on her cot and staring up at the ceiling all night, which was what she would have been doing otherwise. Besides, she had to pay for her food somehow, and after filching juice and cereal from Conrad's pantry once, she felt too guilty to make it habit.

She wandered out of the bar and down the street, hands stuffed in her pockets, gray as the fog hanging on the town. Even though she’d grasped onto something resembling normalcy here, she knew it couldn’t last. Both Conrad and Amelia warned her that she’d be found out if she stayed too long - someone would run their mouth about the new help and word would get around, or an accounting discrepancy would come up in the books, or some overly-enthusiastic Spacer’s Choice representative would ask for her papers. With a half-hope lingering like the mist over the bay, she’d asked about perhaps obtaining some falsified documents. 

Conrad had eyed her with something like weariness as he ripped off his gloves. Their new shipment had been delayed, so they were washing the used ones out and hanging them over the staircase to dry.

“I’m already risking my neck by having you here,” he scoffed. “That’s entirely out of the question.” 

In the bottom of her heart, she knew there was only one way forward - get the ship running and get out of here. She’d done enough errands and odd jobs around Edgewater to keep herself alive. Now she had to leave. Getting to Welles was the closest thing to an escape she saw, and even that prospect didn't fill her with anything close to confidence. 

Those lines of thought put her in a somber mood, and as she walked her usual route down the streets, she almost rounded the corner without a second glance, but that morning she stopped. A slender column in a deep and lovely shade of blue caught her eye. The glossy surface was being eaten away by the briny air, but it was perhaps the first building in town that she could call beautiful. She looked around, and realized she was right in front of the saltuna factory. She must have passed by this building several times before and simply not realized it. Maybe she'd been keeping her eyes on the ground, too. 

One door was barely propped open - not an invitation, necessarily, but enough of one that she didn't feel too bad about pushing open the door and slipping inside. Even in the dimmed light, she could make out the deep blue ceiling, decorated with copper inlays that glowed and reflected the lights. Low orange candles flickered along the walls, cupped and muted in frosted glass containers. At once, she relaxed. As a child, she’d scrambled around the shadowy ruins of boarded-up cathedrals, long-abandoned and dilapidated. They were her favorite places in the whole city, and she’d never feared them. Every dark nook and spiderwebbed cranny was a safe place to hide away. 

She walked between the narrow pews, trailing her hand along the deep brown backs. They weren't real wood, but rather a hard plastic imitation lacquered over to preserve the unnatural shine. There were trees here on the planet, and she wondered why they didn't use them to build much.

In the old days on Earth, when the trees were still around, people used to make houses out of them. In one of the books she'd read as a child, the family lived in a log cabin on the frontier, and she thought that sounded lovely. 

The pulpit was wide, smooth-polished faux marble that was close enough to the real thing to still be pretty. Juno stood behind the pulpit, as if she was facing some imaginary crowd, and traced an artificial vein that had been etched or printed into the plastic. She didn’t know why the stone did that naturally - real marble that people dug out of the ground instead of casting in a factory. There were plenty of topics she was similarly ignorant of. She never looked around much unless it was up at the sky or down at a book, even back on Earth. 

For a frontier colony, Edgewater felt sealed off from the actual ground it stood upon. The barrier between the people and the world they'd found themselves in was guarded as zealously as the front gates. Hours were regulated strictly to the dot, with little concern for the ebbs and flows peculiar to this place. The sun went down at three in the afternoon here, and when she'd asked why they didn't just shift the time zone back to get more sunlight, Conrad looked at her as if she was speaking in tongues. _That's just the way it is_ was the steadfast refrain of Edgewater's people. 

A sharp sound made her head snap up. There was a man wearing blue robes in the entryway, and he looked like someone important. He was blowing out a candle someone had lit, but she had only a split second before he turned around. It was a bad decision, but she panicked, so she ducked behind the pulpit. 

She drew up her legs and crouched inside the fake wooden stand, holding her breath and praying she wasn't making a sound. Sharp footsteps echoed against the floor - the man was walking toward her. No, wait, he was going the other way - 

The footsteps stopped, and she jumped as his hand struck the top of the pulpit. 

“What in Law’s name are you doing under there?” 

Dread made her want to sink into the floor, but she stood up in front of the man, smoothing her coat down with an attempt at dignity, and went to push her hair back before she remembered she didn’t have any. Her hands came to rest behind her back to disguise her awkward fidgeting. 

“Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I think I lost an earring back here, I was just looking around...” 

“Both of your earrings are in your ears.” His voice was flat, save for the curl of disdain that revealed knowledge of her obvious lie. 

“No, uh - different earrings. They were in my pocket. I just bought them.” 

He blinked at her and let out a long sigh. 

“Let’s save us both any further embarrassment from this charade. The door is that way.” He gestured to the entrance of the building. "Please put back anything you were attempting to steal on your way out." 

Her cheeks burned in humiliation. This was the first time she’d wandered out of her daily loop, the first place she’d tried to explore, and she was getting kicked out. And thrown out of a church, no less. She crammed her hands in her pockets under the man’s watchful glare and slouched down the steps with an air of misery. 

She stopped in her tracks, and before she was fully cognizant of what she was doing, she was turning around and talking. 

“I need help,” she said. 

“Pardon me?” The man frowned down at her. 

“I said I need help.” Her thin voice wavered, but she stayed defiant, refusing to drop her gaze in shame. 

And that was how she found herself in the office, pouring out everything that had happened to her up to this point, leaving out the most unbelievable details about Earth and the Hope and being revived, naturally. She was a violation, she remembered, and she wasn’t about to do anything that might attract the attention of the Board. But she was as honest as the situation would permit. She told him about the morgue cot and being mauled by canids and the awful fact that she was stranded here with nowhere to turn. 

For the vicar’s part, he leaned forward in his chair in rapt attention, then straightened up and leaned back whenever she got to something particularly outlandish. 

“So, you're a smuggler," he repeated back to her. "And your ship needs repairs." 

“That's correct. Well, ADA said it was just one part I need. A power regulator?" She coughed, and reminded herself to stop ending all her sentences in questions. It was unbecoming of a space captain, and it looked like that's what she was now. 

"Ada?" 

"My - well - she's the ship. The computer, I suppose."

Juno felt bad when she thought about ADA sitting out there in the forest alone. She'd wanted to go check in with her again, but leaving the walls of the city alone with while running low on ammunition was too risky a prospect to entertain the thought for long. 

He let out another long sigh and twisted the brass ring on his finger. The vicar struck her as a deeply untrustworthy man. Nothing about him put her at ease; not his overselected diction, and not the indulgent, overly-patient tone he'd assumed, either. He was trying too hard to put her at ease, and that smile of his reminded her of the hammerheads in her childhood picture books, gliding smooth under the surface of the ocean with rows upon rows of sharp teeth hidden below. 

But she was desperate. A leap of faith was the only viable option left. Even if it was into shark-infested waters. 

“I believe I can help you,” he said, and of course Juno remembered another one of the rules she’d learned since her descent: there was no such thing as a free haircut, or free help.

“What is it you want in return?” She leaned her elbow on the desk with a confidence she had no right to possess. But if she was playing the swashbuckler captain, she might as well go all-in. 

Turns out it was an odd request - a book. She’d perked up, if only slightly. That meant there were still paper books in circulation within Halcyon. All she’d seen so far was Conrad’s salt-crusted medical encyclopedias, which she was sure he’d never once cracked open. 

“You’ll pay?” She inquired. Distaste made his lip curl in protest.

“In addition to providing information about obtaining the power regulator?”

For a moment, she wavered. 

“Well - “ She was about to give in and say never mind the money, but that wouldn't make any sense - nobody helped people for no reason. Everyone had been quick to remind her of that truth so far. 

“Yes,” she said. “I'm risking my life for your book. Information doesn't keep me fed." 

He considered that silently while quite obviously parsing through some ruminations on the fickle and greedy nature of smugglers. When he finally agreed, she couldn't help but feel a little rush of excitement. She never did things like that - pressing people beyond what they were immediately inclined to give.

Whatever momentary displeasure her fee had caused the vicar passed. With a businesslike air, he laid out the task before her. Walk down to an abandoned company town, dig through an old building, retrieve the book. 

“Sounds easy enough,” she said. 

“You say that now.” He took off his ring and aimlessly spun it on the dark ersatz wood tabletop. She watched the band whirl in a spherical blur, traveling on an oblong path. For a moment, she was transfixed. Gradually, the ring wobbled slower and slower, becoming more firmly etched in reality until it staggered and fell on its side with a rattle. The sound startled her out of her reverie.

"Thank you, sir." She offered her hand to the man. 

“Vicar Maximilian DeSoto,” he said, as he gave her hand a firm shake.

“Captain Alex Hawthorne,” she responded in kind. The shark grinned back at her like he’d sniffed blood. 

“Talk to Reed Tobson in the factory,” he offered. “There's been some dispute over a power regulator recently. I believe he has what you’re looking for.” 

No one truly did, and at that thought, a miserable twinge of regret tugged inside her ribs. Not unless this Reed Tobson was holding a one-way ticket back to Earth and a way to turn back time seventy years. 

But she managed not to say that aloud, and instead rose to her feet without a stray word. Her instinct was to push in the chair, but she refrained. As she made her way out of the office, it hit her that she probably should have asked for half of her money up front. Was that the right way to go about these things? Damn it, she had no idea what she was doing. 

She wasn't used to this terror of freedom. Her world was always defined by the streets she'd ran down all her life, and the hiding places she'd managed to find among them. The most consequential decision she made on the majority of her days was whether to wear her black uniform or her dark charcoal one, whether to say "Have a nice day" or "Thank you, please come again" as the elevator doors opened. There was always a rulebook, or somebody to defer to in every step she took, and by now, deference had become her second nature. But there was no one who could fix this for her; no one to whom she could appeal. The person who was supposed to guide her was dead and she was wearing his name and holding his ID cartridge in her pocket. 

The walls were closing in on her, and her own throat felt tight, but as she stood under the flickering streetlights of Edgewater, she knew she wasn't ready to give up and run into the trap. Not today, anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is Kafka's
> 
> also happy Halloween!


	3. Our Heroine and Her Newly-Formed Crew Get Down to Business; or, "What's A Few Felonies Between Friends?"

Imagine Edgewater, perpetually bathed in gray light and freshened by steady marine winds that swept past the coast and infused the dour and phlegmatic dispositions of its residents. Groggy and enervated as they were, they still ran like clockwork automechanicals; animated by the marionette-strings of dull habit and obedience to higher authority. Regulated as all parts of the machine were, they lumbered along in tempo largo. Time dripped by more slowly there, sliding along the brined streets and curdling in the cracks of the ersatz windowpanes.

This pelagic portrait of resignation, in almost perfect negative, was the Groundbreaker. Day and night here too was confounded, but the effect was opposite that of its waterlogged antipode. The neon lights blinked nonstop, and the air always hummed with some sort of human activity. The promenade was a patchwork of mismatched elements - differently-colored handrails and floorboards, guards with clashing uniforms salvaged from old company shipments, jerry-rigged drones advertising twitching illustrations for every product under the sun.

There was no corporation to provide standard dress or decoration or even machinery, so every component was organically thrown together for utility, and utility alone. There was always something to do on the ship, but the most lively times were evenings such as the one Juno found herself in when she exited the SubLight Shipping office with heavy pockets and a lightened frame of mind. 

A young man who’d known no other life than shipgrime and stardust was wheeling a squeaking cart down the walkway, promising fresh spratwurst and hot facsimile popcorn with a dairyless approximation of butter. His shouts punctuated a bright bubble and swell of conversations in an array of languages and tones; Portuguese and Arabic and English all swirling together. A young couple leaned in a corner, whispering to each other and giggling, impervious to the rest of the world. A group of guards smoked and talked near the elevator. A young mother bounced her irate child on her hip, attempting to soothe her from whatever travesty had just occurred. 

Juno waved to the now-familiar array of merchants and workers as she walked along the promenade, and here, they actually waved back. 

"Hi, Captain Hawthorne." The spratwurst cart man nodded at her. "How's business?" 

"Booming. And you?" 

"Can't complain. Well, I could, but these spratwursts ain't gonna sell themselves." 

She made her way down the promenade, hands firmly stuffed in her pockets. Her crew had just unloaded their latest run for Hagen, and she was going to meet up with them in the Lost Hope. Over the past few months, the bar had become their hole-in-the-wall of choice, and Juno knew they’d be eager to spend some of the bits they’d just earned. 

She smiled as she spotted the familiar Spacer’s Choice sign, fizzling from a faulty backlight, and the ever-present luminescent spherical headgear gracing the poor man behind the shelves.

“Martin, how are you?” She eased an elbow up on the counter. 

“Welcome to Spacer’s Choice, it’s not the best choice. It’s - “ 

“Spacer’s Choice. Right," she finished. By now, she could recite his greeting, too.

“The usual, Captain Hawthorne? As a Consumer Relations Choice Specialist, Martin is required to remember your buying preferences.” 

“Sure.”

Whenever he started referring to himself in third-person, it was time to tread lightly. His consciousness seemed like a finely-stretched glass filament, and after their first encounter, she tried not to push him too hard for fear he might shatter. 

He placed the bar of soap on the counter, wrapped in the same perfectly identical cardboard packaging as every other bar of soap he'd sold her. She really should have bought them in bulk, but she refrained so that he might have a friendly face to count on catching sight of every once in a while.

“Oh," she began. "Did you know you left your account logged in on the public computer?” 

“Oh.” The syllable was strangled and died in his throat with abject despair. “Which one?”

“Down by SubLight. It said you have a new message from your mom.” 

“Did you read it?” 

“No,” she lied. 

“Why me?” The plastic moon tilted up ever so slightly, as if he were beseeching the heavens themselves. "Why?" 

“Okay, bye, it was nice to see you.” She took her soap and tucked it into her side bag and took off down the walkway. Sure enough, when she rounded the corner to the Lost Hope, everyone was already either crowding around the bar or making their way to their customary rickety table in the corner. 

“Up.” Ellie gestured at a lone traveler who was currently occupying the table. “We’re sitting here.” 

“Fuck off.” He sneered into his Spacer’s Ale. 

“Were you raised in a cystypig factory?" She put a hand on her hip. "There’s one of you, and you’re sitting at the largest table. That's so inconsiderate.” 

“Do you have a ship in the bay?” Juno asked, sliding in between him and Ellie. “Small craft? Two-seater?”

“Yeah, what's - ” 

“I think you docked it in Bedford's official spot.” 

“What?”

“I just saw them hitching some chains up and towing it to impound.”

“I - shit.” He slammed his drink down and tore out of the establishment. 

“Nice one, Captain.” 

Juno laid her bag on the table. She wasn’t a good liar, but to her surprise and curiosity, she evidently wasn’t a particularly bad one, either. 

“Did you go see Moonman again?” Ellie nodded down at the soap sticking out of her pocket as she settled into the corner seat. 

“Yeah. We need to figure out a way to get him out of there.” Juno shook her head, dragging up the chair next to her. “I keep asking him to come aboard, but he says he’s got a contract.” 

“Oh, Captain,” Ellie crossed her arms. “Don’t go falling in love on us now. We have a good thing going here. If you start settling down, who’s gonna run this operation?” 

“Wait, who are you talking about? Who does Captain like?” Felix set his Spacer’s Ale down on the table too hard. 

Juno let out a flat _nobody_ and Ellie a peaked _that Spacer’s Choice freak_ at the same time. 

“Captain.” He gasped in horror. “No. You can’t.” 

“Wait.” Juno frowned. “What’s so bad about Martin?”

“Are you kidding? He’s a corporate tool.” 

"I don’t rightly think that’s fair. I mean - it’s lot’s of people who end up doing things they don’t necessarily love.” Parvati spoke up as she slid into the booth next to him. “And people who still try to do their best at it anyway - I think it’s awful dignified of ‘em.” 

“This is different.” Felix crossed his arms. “I would die before I put one of those moon masks on my head. Literally. Put me up against the wall and fire.” 

“D’ya think his contract is only for his lifetime, or are his kids in the line of succession, too?” Ellie laughed. “Picture a bunch of little Martins, all with their own tiny little moon helmets.” 

That made Juno catch a sour air and stare back out the doorway at the bustle of the promenade. It wasn’t funny; it was just sad. Juno had no taste for drawing blood, and Ellie always took things too far.

The rest of the crew continued talking, but Juno hunched over the table, staring at the drink Felix had kindly brought her, and letting her mind wander through the sights and sounds without latching on to anything in particular. She tapped her fingers on the table, listening to the satisfying clink of her rings against the table. They were real jewels, and certainly the nicest things she'd ever owned. The coat she'd bought last week was probably a close second. She'd been horrified when Ellie complimented the garment, pointing out that it was real wooly cow fur. Juno had tried to play it off like everything was fine as she silently apologized to the cow. 

“We don't know. Maybe he likes it.” Ellie shrugged. 

“Or maybe the Board ground him down into a soulless cog.” Felix jabbed the table with his finger. 

“There’s no way he was ever normal.” 

“Well...:” Parvati sighed. “People do a lot of changin’ in life. More than you might think." She brightened up. "And that means maybe someday he'll change again. Maybe he'll come with us, or at least stop being a moon man.” 

“How do you get someone to go against their nature?” Juno finally spoke up, tracing her finger along the rim of her glass. 

“You don’t,” Felix responded. “At some point, people have to make a decision for themselves. You’re either with us, or against us.” 

“Who might ‘us’ be, Mr. Millstone?” Max finally joined them, dragging the chair Felix was resting his foot on out from under him and ostentatiously setting himself down in it. 

“Well, not you. Bootlicker.” 

“If you spent half as much time expanding your mind as you do expanding your vocal cords, you’d understand a little bit more about the world - “

“You’re just being a jackass because the Hammers got creamed yesterday. Guess what, Vicar? They get creamed every game. They’re terrible this season. Give it up already.” 

“Oh, I’m being a jackass because my tossball team lost?” Indignation flashed through his voice. 

“Yeah. That's what I said." 

“Then what’s your excuse?”

Felix sat up straighter in his chair, pointing across the table. 

“I would fight an old man, just so you know.” 

The vicar barely paused, with his beer an inch away from his mouth, voice steeled, nose flaring with barely-concealed rage. 

“And you’d lose.”

The bickering broke out into a dull roar around Juno. No fight stayed personal among the crew of the Unreliable for long. 

“Felix, that ain’t kind. He’s really not that old...and he's been to prison...I wouldn’t risk it - “ 

“No, wait, I’d love to see this." Ellie banged on the table. "Fight, fight - “ 

“Come on!” Juno finally erupted. She knew herself; there was a ribbon of sensitivity running through her heart and mind, and when it was touched upon, for some reason, she grew angry before anything else. “Can we at least pretend we like each other out in public? Save it for the ship.” 

Felix let out a long sigh and leaned back in his chair before folding his hands in deep concentration. After a moment, he looked up, giving Juno a very tortured, very earnest expression of conciliation. 

“If you’re in love with Martin, I can’t say I’d be happy - and I don't know much about these things - “ 

“Or things of any nature.” 

“But,” Felix ignored the Vicar’s interjection, “I approve of you, Captain. Whatever it is you do. Or, uh - who-ever.” 

“Thank you, Felix.” Juno tried to match his solemn tone. He reached out and offered his hand for her to clasp. Reluctantly, she took it. 

“I support you, Captain.” 

“Thank you, Felix," she intoned, and he finally, thankfully, released her hand. The few sips of ale she'd had were drawing out the exhaustion from her bones, and she resisted the urge to rub her eyes.

“Okay, enough of...whatever that was. Let’s talk business. We should huddle up.” They barely moved their chairs, and Juno waved them in. “Closer, come on.” 

With scoffs of disgust and eye-rolls, they all closed in around the table, and leaned in to hear her. 

“So, SubLight’s offering us a lucrative job. But this will assuredly take us out of the misdemeanor territory into the f-word.” She shook out the papers she’d printed out from an old legal database, which sprung out and unfolded in their accordionesque trail.

"Wait, what f-word are we talking about?" Felix whispered.

"I'll give you a hint," Ellie hissed under her breath. "It ends in -elony." 

"Anyone who isn’t willing to risk hard time needs to collect their next payment and depart," Juno murmured.

This was how she was making it work thus far - learning every pitfall and trap that had been laid out in the system to catch rats like her, and scurrying around them. She was always good at memorizing seemingly useless information in school, and so she played the pirate by learning the rules of the board officials. Every time they handled contraband that would take them up a level in prosecutorial consequences, she’d tell the crew. As long as she was honest, Juno supposed, nobody she'd dragged along with her could fault her for anything. 

At this point it was mere formality, and after the first few times she’d presented their future plans to the crew, the nervous edge that they might leave her had dissipated. They were like her, really. They had very little to lose.

“Are we satisfied?” Juno glanced around the room, checking for the varying nods. “Okay.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Felony misappropriation of corporate goods, Class II.” 

They repeated it back to her, with varying levels of enthusiasm, and she decided that was as tolerable a response as she was going to extract from them for now. 

“Next stop, Monarch. We have to take care of this SubLight business, and go meet my contact in Fallbrook.” 

“Thank you, Captain.” Max spoke, stone-still. His eyes did not waver from her countenance, and she knew why. He'd come along with her because he was looking for something, and it was on Monarch.

Parvati, sweet Parvati - she’d come aboard the ship and pressed her nose to the glass windows with all the stars dancing in her brown eyes. She and Juno would stand at the wide window by the engine and try to figure out which nebulas and moons they were gliding by. More often than not, they were wrong, but consulting the map and discovering their ignorance only made Parvati laugh. But Juno found her once, curled up next to the circular window where they liked to hang out, with her eyes glistening. 

“What’s wrong?” Juno sat down next to her, offering a steady hand on her shoulder. 

“I just - “ She wiped her nose on her rag, and stuttered. “I -”

“Hey, it’s okay - “ 

“When I was a kid, I always wanted to see Byzantium.” The words burst out of her in gunfire-rapid staccato. “I always imagined how pretty it would be. Big buildings and fancy food and beautiful outfits. It was the best thing I could imagine. I wanted to visit more than anything. Not to stay. Just to see it.” She sniffed, and tapped her finger on the glass. “And there it is.” 

Terra 2 sat silent and enormous in the distance. Sweeps of white clouds dragged and swirled across the surface: blue ocean, green land. Parvati smiled. 

“Thank you, Captain.” 

They’d sat for a while, pointing out the mountains, trying to guess where Edgewater might be, trying to guess what the people down there were doing right now, as they watched from above. Parvati had no ends, only means to offer, and her spirit was constantly buoyed by uncertainty of every kind. 

The vicar was different. He’d had an itch under his skin ever since Juno pressed that book into his hand back in Edgewater. His eyes were not fixed on the stars in the distance but on the space in between them, hungrily breaking them down and reassembling the vacuum in the image of his Plan. Juno wasn’t afraid of him anymore like she’d been that day in the vicarage. If you’d told that frightened goggle-eyed person contorting herself underneath a pulpit that in a few months, she’d be leaning on the doorway of the vicar’s quarters and exchanging friendly conversation, she wouldn’t have believed it. 

The closer they got to Monarch, the more frequently her doubts about him began to resurface and whisper in her mind. But for now, there was nothing concrete she could point to, and he was a good gun anyway.

Law knew she needed those, for her own combat skills were by no means sufficient. The laser pistol on her hip saw more action in bar fights and minor highway robberies than anything else. She could aim it at the ceiling and fire off shots menacingly enough to get any interlopers to leave her alone, and that was working so far. In combat, she was frequently terrified - after every firefight, she usually snuck off to go dry heave or hyperventilate behind a building alone, so no one would see the true extent of her cowardice. 

And when she was alone with herself and the stars drifting by the window in her chamber, she allowed that truth to surface: she was hopelessly, indisputably a coward. How could anyone not be? She preferred remaining alive, and she’d not yet grown accustomed to the daily challenges to that fact. 

No, she’d buckled in for the long haul here in the Halcyon system. She’d made the world around into her an object of study: she learned the tossball teams, the local foods, the layout of the star system and the planets within it. She laughed at jokes she didn’t understand until she’d convinced herself she’d grown up here right along with everyone else. Identity was fragile, and rewriting hers proved to be no great obstacle. _I’m Alex Hawthorne_ , she thought to herself as she looked in the mirror every morning. _Captain of the Unreliable. I live in the Halcyon Colony. This is my ship. I belong here._

Part of her was frightened at how easy it had been to efface herself and start over. It should have been disturbing, but she had developed the sense that her second chance was so fortuitous that she ought not question it too deeply.

She lorded over her own life now. Other people looked at her with a respect she’d never garnered on Earth. She didn't clean the blood off her spacesuit and bluffed her way through all varieties of exchange with the people around her, and somehow, they all actually believed she knew what she was doing. It was nothing short of a miracle, and what was a miracle, but an occurrence whose cracks need not be examined too closely? 

Nobody really listened to anything anyone else said, she realized, staring at the faces milling around in the bar. Everyone lived in a world of their own, bumping into other individuals and only affording them the briefest of glances to confirm their already-existing expectations - yep, that checks out, uh-huh, nothing out of the ordinary, have a nice day. There were worlds full of people talking to each other, but not really hearing any of it. 

They each downed a few more drinks and collected themselves and their belongings and headed back to the promenade, trying to figure out where to descend upon next. 

“Juno!” 

She snapped around. The blinking neon lights and twirling signs seared her retinas, and her gaze darted from person to person mingling in the crowd. Their movements felt too sharp, too fast, like she was watching a tape someone had sped up until there was nothing recognizable in the jerky motions and bright lights. 

“Juno, come here!” 

A woman called after a child who was tottering away as fast as her little legs would take her. Predictably, that was not very fast. With a few strides, the woman caught up and snatched the baby in her arms, ignoring her shrieks as she carried her back into the medical bay. 

Her throat was dry. Juno was an odd name, where she was from. When she was from. It must be popular out here in the colonies. It had been seventy years, after all. Things were different now, in both time and distance. That thought surprised her every time it cropped up. 

“Captain?” 

Juno wheeled back around to see Felix blinking at her.

“Uh, Captain...are you all right? You sort of zoned out for a second there.” 

Now Max was staring at her, too, and Ellie. Juno glanced between them all, at their myriad expressions ranging from concern to curiosity to disturbance. 

“I'm getting tired." She rubbed her eyes at last. "I think I'll head back to the ship. You all have fun. We're taking off at 7 am, sharp."

As soon as she made it back to her quarters on the ship, Juno sat down on her rumpled bed, pulled by the weight of dejection. Parvati was no doubt with Junlei, but Ellie or Felix would have probably happily brought her along to see whatever friends or associates they were visiting. She didn't know what Max did on the nights they docked here, but he wasn't here right now either. She was entirely alone on the ship for the first time since she'd discovered it in the wilderness outside of Edgewater. 

But her circumstances had since taken a fortunate turn. No longer did she go to bed hungry, or cold, or fearful, and anyone who might discount the value of those assurances had likely never experienced want of them. The kitchen was lined with all the food she could eat. A heap of dust-odored blankets sat on the foot of her bed. The ship was locked up and safe from outsiders. She was on a near-certain course to wealth, and above all, comfort. 

She kicked off her boots and changed her clothes and tried to lay back on her bed and relax as the metal below her groaned and creaked in the dark. Her mind still raced sometimes at night like this, as if all the thoughts she'd buried during the day scratched and ripped their way back out, demanding attention as soon as she turned out the lights. 

She rose and tiptoed down the metal stairs. No one had come back, but she felt like she should be quiet anyway. Her default inclination was to make her presence as small as possible, and to refrain from disturbing anyone or anything, even the warm stale air.

"Hello, Captain Hawthorne." Ada's soothing voice instantly put her at ease as she entered the navigation room. "You are alone." 

"Very astute, Ada." Juno glanced up at the smooth metal ceiling. "Thank you." 

"You are sarcastic. I am programmed to recognize this behavior in humans. According to the conventions of sarcasm, you are actually not thankful at all." 

"Tell me more." She eased into the captain's chair, drawing up her leg underneath her. 

"Sarcasm is a rhetorical tool often adopted by humans in which they use an ironic detachment between the reality of their circumstances and their reaction to simultaneously imply and avoid saying that which they truly mean." 

"Sounds like cowardice." Juno leaned her elbow up on the chair, relaxing in place. The warm red glow dappling the walls was beautiful. Maybe not the kind of thing most people would call beautiful, but it really was something, when you stopped and looked at it.

"Now, you are earnest." 

"I try to be. As far as the situation permits." She smiled. And try, she did. There was no place lonelier than a lie. 

The ship was dark and quiet, and she'd come to like it this way. Not all the time, but when she was in moods like these. She started fiddling with one of the controls on the panel, watching the needle slowly tick like a metronome behind the glass. 

"Would you like to engage in further conversation on this topic?"

"No, you don't have to talk to me. I just...wanted to see what you were doing." Juno crossed her legs and fanned herself a little. 

"My databanks indicate that members of your species frequently experience feelings of 'loneliness,' in which you suffer adverse psychological and physical effects from prolonged separation from other humans," Ada replied. "Are you lonely, Captain?"

"I have friends," Juno said. 

"But you are not with them now." 

"No." Juno listened to the hum of the ship for a minute before speaking again. "Are you lonely, Ada?" 

"I am not programmed to experience such emotions. I am not human, nor am I sentient." 

"But you do miss Captain Hawthorne?" She dropped her voice. "The real one, I mean?" 

The cooling system kicked on in the background. The Groundbreaker was still a touch too hot for her comfort. Perhaps it was an automatic adjustment of sensors and gauges, merely waiting for the rattling noise of air circulation to die down, but Ada hesitated before she responded. 

"Affirmative." 

"What was he like?" 

"I would prefer not to discuss him, Captain."

Despite her protestations, that was about the most human-like thing she could've possibly said. Juno shifted in the chair and thought about all the people she'd rather not talk about. A friend whose shoes she'd borrowed and never returned, given that she was here, and all. An on-and-off boyfriend she'd went to school with, who was nice enough. Back then, she figured she'd probably end up marrying him someday, and they'd be resigned to a quiet life of work and sleep and mostly-getting along. Her mother, of course. Her little sister. Her older sister. Now, they were simply abstracted. Just a lot of dead people no one else in the entire star system had ever known, or would ever know. They, too, were illegible to anyone else she'd ever meet again. 

They were silent for another moment before Ada, professional as always, interjected again. 

"Captain, Phineas Welles attempted to hail you today. You were off-ship, but he recorded a message for you." 

"Don't play it," she said. That very evening, she'd studied the wanted poster on the docks that bore his portrait for a long time, and read the list of crimes he was charged with out to herself as if transfixed: _Treason. Treason II. Sedition. Theft of Board Property over 50,000. Nonpayment of Docking Fine_. The transgressions went on and on. 

She stopped and examined them every time she saw his poster, but she did not want to meet him. She didn’t want to think about him; she didn’t want to know what he intended to do with her in the first place when he’d stolen her off the Hope, or what his reasoning was. She wondered why, of all people, he'd brought an elevator attendant clawing and gasping back to consciousness, and then berated herself for questioning her survival and dulled her mind back to the reality of her situation. She had something here - a semi-functioning ship, a crew, a name. She couldn’t stand to think about losing it. If Alex Hawthorne was who she had to be to survive here, then that’s who she was now. There was no need to push the boundaries of her universe. 

Eventually, she said goodnight to Ada and crept back up the stairs, stopping by the kitchen to get a glass of fruitless juice and something resembling chips, if they'd been crafted from air-fried styrofoam and copious amounts of salt. She sat up in her bed and fished a book out from the stack by her bed. She wasn't lonely, and if she was, there was nothing a little distraction couldn't fix. She flipped through one of the paperbacks she'd snagged the last time she was on the Groundbreaker - a murder mystery. The paper was pulpy and rough and riddled with typos, clearly printed by a little shop somewhere, probably written in-house with little finesse and less time. The thought of people physically setting the type, or working the binding machines, or leaning over a desk and composing the story itself was a comfort to her. There were people on the other side of the book in her hands; across time, across space. 

She drifted off thinking about the gaudy old house where the murder had taken place, and the grizzled old detective; his partner, the brash young detective; the beautiful ingenue with a secret; the charming and mysterious visitor who'd entered halfway through the book and clearly knew something the rest of them didn't.

These little people in their closed system, moving from scene to scene, predictably suspicious and frightened and angry all in their proper turns, were comforting. She could trace their routes, with deviations minor enough to add interest but never so major as to render the genre unrecognizable. Perhaps she was more amenable to overarching plans than she thought. A set path, a defined boundary - it would be a relief.

It would be a relief if she could remember why she'd filed into a narrow frozen tomb on that colony ship in the first place. Her other memories were sharp, too sharp, as if seventy years of isolation in the blankness of space had scratched them deep into her mind. But the reasoning for it all was gone, absorbed into the vacuum of nothingness. Why had she left?

As she cut the light and laid the book down next to her on the bed, she decided she'd prefer not to remember. Her old life was pathetic and average; a long sequence of timorous foggy days and cramped leaky apartments and threads of sadness shooting through it all like veins swirled through marble. She appraised its worth like any other piece of junk she'd encountered in Halcyon - lifted it up, squinted at it from side to side, then tossed it away. It was worth forgetting. 


	4. "And Life Slips By Like a Field Mouse, Not Shaking the Grass"

“We’ve arrived at Stellar Bay.” 

Ada’s voice broke the quiet hum of conversation floating around the ship. The crew all rushed to the window, an unofficial sort of ritual that had begun somewhere along their travels through the system. Juno threaded her fingers through the handle high up on the wall, bracing herself for impact. Landings could be rough, and whether that might have been an issue with Ada’s calibrations or the ship’s hardware, she couldn’t say. All she knew was that whenever they entered a descent maneuver, it was best to grab something and hold on.

The ship smacked the pad with a worrisome crunch, engines screeching, then ground to a halt with the weight of a great beast letting out a deep exhale. Parvati, well-attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the _Unreliable_ , was clutching the ladder bolted into the ground. Max was attempting to recover his balance against the wall, and unsuccessfully trying to hide the fact he’d momentarily lost it in the first place. Felix and Ellie were the recipients of gravity’s most pronounced punishment; both ungracefully clutching onto each other in a rare moment of generosity from the not-so-good doctor. As with most such instances, it was fleeting, and when they’d finally righted themselves, Ellie shook him off like a gnat. 

It was dark here. Shadows draped over the buildings and trees around them, suggesting nothing but the vaguest outline of the town below. The inkiness was deep; green-hued, dimly burnt through here or there by stray touches of low streetlights.

“Wow.” Felix tapped his knuckle on the window. “So that’s Monarch.” 

“Landing key’s in order.” Juno let go of the handle and staggered down to the middle of the room. “First thing tomorrow, we’ll check out the city.” 

Monarch was frightening. Everywhere was frightening to Juno, but Monarch bore special warnings. Felix terrified her with his rambling plot summaries of a popular ongoing serial set on Monarch, sometimes jointly relayed with interludes from Parvati. Juno told herself it was all fiction - an enterprise like the Board had a vested interest in portraying the renegade Monarch as an uninhabitable, wild place. She recognized all the typical gestures in the serial: beleaguered frontier towns barely scraping by, rabid wildlife, an air of uncertainty in a place that had yet to be tamed or mapped. But whatever was truth or fiction or half-truth or colonial propaganda, she certainly wasn’t going to head out there for the first time in the dark. 

However, although there was comparably little said about the plans of women, there was no reason to believe they ought to meet any different fate than those of mice and men. 

Before the crew could scatter, the lights flickered off, muting and dying in slow succession from bow to stern. The acid blue of the hallway emergency lights began to bleed through the darkness as they softly glowed to life. 

“Ada?” Juno rounded the corner and strode into the control room. “Can you restart the generator?” 

“No.” The lift in Ada’s voice was surprising. “I cannot at this time.” 

She stopped walking. 

“Well, can you get power from our backup systems?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“What’s going on?” Parvati followed Juno into the control room. “I know the backups’er working, I tuned them up just yesterday.” She put her hands on her hips with a charming authority; like the virtuoso conductor standing in front of her orchestra. “Ada? Can you do a hard reset and powerwash the main engine? If that don’t do the job, let’s check the lights again. I’d reckon we’re dealing with a break in the circuitry somewhere where it matters.” 

“I’m not certain. I do not appear to have access to primary or secondary systems at this time.”

“Because you’re not the one controlling the lights.” Max’s voice was flat as he entered the control room, standing between Juno and Parvati and peering over their shoulders at the control screen. 

“Affirmative,” Ada responded.

“Someone else is interfering?” Juno peered down at the scrambled navigation screen, currently flickering as if half the display had been torn off. Parvati flipped open the breaker on the wall, frowning; Max hunched over the primary controls, typing something into the keyboard. 

“Vicar? Can you open the - “ 

“I’m on it.” The keys clacked under his fingers. “Try it now.” 

In the midst of Parvati flipping the switches and Max furiously typing, the communications screen snapped and fizzled to life. There, in all his pixelated ignominy, stood Dr. Welles, in what appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, and Juno’s stomach dropped like a rock. 

“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” 

“Yes,” Juno answered, uneasily. Her primary instinct told her to duck under the screen so he couldn’t see her, but it was too late. “Why are you here? What’s going on with my ship?” 

“I bypassed your comms throttle. And every other frontline security system you've put in place.” A touch of irritation crept into his voice. “Have you been ignoring my messages?” 

Juno turned around to Max and Parvati, who were watching the screen with confusion. 

“Will you two give us a moment?” She asked, and with nods, the two of them turned to go. Juno took a deep breath and turned back around to face his scowl on the screen. Her voice felt wavery, but she managed to get the words out. 

“I’ve been occupied.” 

“There is very little that I can imagine to be of greater importance than our project.” 

“Yours. Not mine,” she blurted. “I'm really sorry, but I want nothing to do with this.”

Welles reacted as if she’d told him something patently impossible, and all of her proposed similes for that situation fell flat in her mind. As if gravity had reversed? It could, with a functioning gravitational disruptor and a little sense of adventure. As if she’d told him the sky was red? It was, on some planets in this system. Her parameters of possibility had been demolished in the past couple of months.

Finally, he closed his mouth and composed himself, launching into a tone that sounded similar to a schoolmaster reproaching a stubborn child. 

“I can appreciate the events of recent months must have been...challenging for you. But I’m afraid there is something much, much larger here than your struggles. Rarely do people experience the fortuitous chance of fate that you have been offered. I suggest you seize it. Don’t you see? The Board teaches that every component of life is exactly where it should be. You are evidence against the Plan embodied. You are the linchpin in a drama much grander than either of us.” He cleared his throat. "As I was saying, I have a contact on Monarch I need you to meet. She should be in Stellar Bay. Her name is - " 

“I don’t want to be the linchpin,” she said, more forcefully. “I want to live my life to the best of my ability. As far as I'm concerned, that doesn't involve you.” 

“How solipsistic of you. What about your fellow colonists on the ship? You’re content to leave them frozen in a death that could be temporary, were it not for your inaction?” 

“I don't know anything about them. I don't see how I could help them - " 

“Your ship was full of the brightest and bravest minds Earth ever sent us. Scientists. Engineers. Luminaries, meant to lead Halcyon into a better future. How can you - “ 

“Not me.” To her horror, her nose started to prickle. “I apologize, but when you chose me, you chose wrong. I can’t do this for you.” 

“You're not doing it for me,” he seethed. “You have a responsibility to your fellow colonists. To everyone in this system - “ 

“Nobody has ever gone out of their way for me,” she fired back. “Never. Not once in my life. If I don't take care of myself, who will?” 

“I did. I saved you - ” 

“You abandoned me!” 

Heat flushed through her face in a furious wave. She surprised herself, but she was yelling now, leaning into the screen as if he was really there. The rage bubbled to the surface: weeks of not sleeping from pure terror, always looking over her shoulder in fear that she would be discovered. She didn’t regret releasing it onto him. He deserved it. He dropped her onto a foreign planet with nothing more than a haphazard _good luck._ And despite it all, she’d found something in this star system. No - she’d built something. She wouldn’t let him take it away from her based on half-baked fantasies of overthrowing the Board and saving the day. That was for aetherwave serials and pulp novels. This was real life.

Welles was silent and struggling. To put his own words together; to comprehend what was taking place before him, perhaps finally realizing how helpless he was to stop it. Juno knew that expression, that feeling; she’d experienced it so many times before. It gave her no pleasure to see him similarly powerless, but neither was it enough to sway her decision to the contrary. 

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he finally said. “Perhaps you’re...correct about me waking the wrong colonist.” 

“I’m glad you see that now.” Emotion wavered through her voice, bottled up and stoppered with her absolute refusal to cry in front of him, even if it was clear that was exactly what she was on the verge of doing. “Goodbye, Dr. Welles.” 

The screen snapped off without a farewell. She let out a long breath, then hit the control panel. The sharp pain in her hand made her want to hit something else, too, but she settled for slumping over the navigational array, head in her hands. Fury and sorrow and fear coursed through her all at once, but the root threading down through all those surges of emotion was discomfort. Something low and deep in the very baseboards of her being was writhing, uncomfortable, like a fat grub staked through and pinned to a dissection board, wriggling uselessly to escape. She felt horrific, as if her very existence was vibrating at the wrong frequency of the universe around her, and all she could do was stumble from one predestined calamity to the next. 

“Captain,” Ada intoned. “All system functions have returned to baseline.” 

“Thank you.” Her voice was muffled through her hands, and she sniffed. She had to throw on her disguise. There was a roomful of people outside that couldn’t see her this way - there would be too many explanations, too many questions. She was supposed to be brave and careless, and brave people didn't cry. 

She pushed her hair back and dried her eyes on her sleeve, and made her way back into the common area. They were all doing a bad job of not staring at her, pretending as if they hadn’t heard her shouting. 

“Everything okay, boss?” Uncharacteristic timidity thread through Felix’s voice. 

“Let’s go to Stellar Bay,” she said. Famous last words, she thought, but she led them into marching formation without a trace of hesitation. 

  
  


“ - and then I told him, not with that thing, you won't!“ 

One snippet of Felix’s story rose above the din of the crowd, promptly followed by Parvati’s laugh erupting above the heads and bodies milling around the cramped bar. He, in particular, had a way of drawing out Parvati’s incongruously loud laughter, and once his power was discovered, he hammed it up as much as possible around her, often to the point of driving the engineer to tears while she begged him to stop being so funny. 

Juno lifted the collar of her shirt a few times, trying to relieve the oppressive warmth. Glancing around the room at all the thick clothing, she wondered if these flashes of heat were another peculiarity of her potentially altered biochemistry. Or maybe she’d been sweaty all the time back on Earth too. It was more of a story she was telling herself about herself than any realistic observation, she figured, and decided to forget it. 

She wouldn’t call herself a drinker, but she wasn’t opposed to the designation, either; and as popular of a pastime as overindulgence seemed to be in the colonies, she figured she’d better get used to it. Evenings of playing cards and drinking with the crew were better than sitting around in her room alone. Bars used to scare her, but now they were comforting in their familiar typology. There was absolutely nothing unexpected that ever happened in these frontier saloons. The details of the pictures were different: unpainted timber walls versus eroded metal slathered with soot, tired factory workers or rowdy spacers, but even variations on the scene settled cozily into categorization.

The vicar was in a bad mood too - not an uncommon occurrence, but now, stewing in her own unhappy miasma, she felt a small alliance between them. She nodded at him as she made her way up to the bar, angling for another drink.

“If you like wine, ask for the fortified.” He stretched his elbow onto the counter, barely turning to address her. 

“Is it better?” 

“Stronger.” 

While she waited for her drink, she turned to Max, who was staring into a nearly-empty tumbler of whiskey. She ordered him another one, too, and the two of them sat sipping their drinks in quiet dignified despondency. 

The sign flickering behind the bar proclaimed the establishment as _The Yacht Club_. There wasn't a yacht in sight, and Juno was certain there'd never been one within miles of Stellar Bay. From what little she'd glimpsed on the dark streets, the town was laid out similar to Edgewater, but the broken windows and orange glow from the streetlamps made it seem wilder and harder. The saloon was certainly more frenetic than Edgewater's, pulsing and jumping with an energy in stark contrast to the bar's fussy filigreed wallpaper that seemed more suited to a dowager's house than a hole-in-the-wall like this.

“We’ll head straight to Fallbrook tomorrow.” Juno finally punctured the silence. If she hadn't, he probably would have, and there's no telling where they might have ended up from that point. 

“I appreciate your haste.” The amber liquor in his glass swirled as he tapped the side.

“This scholar - are you sure he can help you?” 

"As sure as one can be." He looked up at her with a solemn gaze. "He might be a Philosophist, but he's an accomplished translator." 

The aftershocks of the vicar’s reaction when she gave him the journal in Edgewater hadn’t yet fled her mind. Parvati and Juno had flattened against the wall while he raged. Juno offering up her two semesters’ worth of high school German for whatever they might have been worth had only resulted in another trinket flying off his desk. He had quite an arm. She could see how he might have been a more-than-fair tossball player some decades before. 

Since that episode, he’d settled into this morose calm, and spells of moodiness aside, she'd like to think they were able to count one another as friends now. 

“Tell me about the Plan,” she said, and if there was any humor in having this conversation earnestly in a bar, she was sure some part of him sensed it, if the quick exhale and quasi-smile he gave behind his heavy hand was any indication. Yes, he was one of her friends now. Even if he had pegged an OSI plaque in her general direction once. 

“I’m always happy to probe the intricacies of the universe. What would you like to know?” 

“What if destiny doesn't line up like it's supposed to?” She took a slug of her wine. It tasted good, at least, but sweeter than she was used to. 

“If something happens, it was an inherent part of the Plan in the first place.” His voice grew serious. “All things - and all people - are precisely where they ought to be, Captain Hawthorne.” 

She took another drink to disguise her unease. He didn’t know how that sentence stabbed at her. He couldn’t know. 

“Isn’t that...tautological?” She hunched forward over the bar. “The Plan is true because there are no mistakes, and there are no mistakes because the Plan is true?” 

Rather than taking offense at her questioning, he seemed amused. 

“I do so enjoy it when you loosen your tongue a bit. It's rare to find another educated mind in these backwaters. But I must say, you’re passing through well-tread philosophical ground. I could recommend you a few monographs on the matter that you might find illuminating.” 

She took her small black notebook out of her pocket and passed it to him. She wouldn't read the books, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

She wasn't nearly as interested in the intricacies of the universe as he seemed to think she was - or as educated. University hadn't panned out the way she'd hoped for as a child, and furthermore, rigorous and technical learning had never been her strong suit. She had lifelong difficulties with the tangible. Talk was all she had. Weaving words out of cobwebs and crumpled scraps came easy, but at the end of the day, it didn't require much intimacy with material reality.

He took her pen and scribbled a few lines down in a cramped hand before passing the notebook back. Before he released it back into her grip, he paused, and she glanced up at him. 

“There is an order guiding our lives, Captain. We cannot avoid following it any more than a computer can avoid following its code.” 

She nodded, able to hold that thought in her mind with neither acceptance nor rejection. It quieted some of that ugly writhing deep in her mind, but it also stoked more precipitous twists and turns in her gut. How easy it was for the fortunate to say that everything had gone exactly as it was meant to. How easy, especially, for the living. 

She took a long, deep gulp to drown that thought, and suddenly the wineglass was empty. A deep purple rivulet slid down the bowed crystal, and she watched its downward trail with unusual fixation.

She wondered what the Vicar would say if she told him about Welles. He'd probably agree with her that there was no use getting involved in dangerous and probably-heretical seditious activity. Not when they had a good thing going with the smuggling and petty crime. At times, his practicality still took her by surprise, but she was beginning to anticipate it. Parvati and Ellie wouldn't be too keen on getting involved, either.

Only Felix would notably protest. She might've agreed with him five or ten years ago, but if there'd ever been any fight in her, it had been stamped out long ago. Years of realizing there was ultimately nothing more to life than serving and waiting for the days to trickle by had made her curl in on herself. 

She was meant to be an inoffensive set-piece in the background of the lives of the people who truly mattered, meant to smooth out any bumps in their experience of the world so they didn't have to fetch their own packages, or even trouble themselves to press the correct button on an elevator. Once, her life had been worth nothing but the convenience it created. 

She said something to Max, slid off the stool, and approached the bartender for another drink. It was in her hand surprisingly fast. She stood there amicably chugging her wine and thinking that she might as well not step too far away from the bar, if she was going to order another one soon. And she was. A second wind had carried her through the fog, and she sat with her chin in her hand, now in a rather excellent mood, scanning the crowd for Ellie. She might have ducked out and headed back to the ship. Generally, she liked to be asleep early, and she did not like anyone getting in the way of that preference. 

One more drink - she'd asked for the extra-large size. She collected it and turned around before all the energy of her sudden movement was halted by crashing into another body.

The wineglass hit the floor and bounced. With a slow drippy glance, she raised her eyes to the woman in front of her, then down to her chest. A huge purple stain bloomed across the front of her blouse - the former contents of Juno's fake-glass, she realized, and they were both soaked. 

“What the fuck?” Juno shook the wetness off her arm, frowning at the acrid smell that suddenly filled the air.

“Oh, a charmer. Lucky me." The woman in front of her made a face of contempt, holding her sloshing half-empty glass up and away from them both. The wine that made it to the ground pooled around their feet, and Juno stepped backwards in distaste. 

“Hey!” The bartender yelled behind them. The woman’s eyes widened, and to Juno’s absolute shock, they both grabbed for each others' arms and set off in the same direction, darting around the other patrons in a half-walk too fast to be casual.

The man shouted at them again, something sharp - the woman's name, maybe, then groaned in exasperation as they rounded the corner to the dimly-lit hallway.

The woman practically pulled her down the hall until she expertly halted in front of one of the rickety doors. The corridor slid and somersaulted around Juno as she accidentally bumped into her again. 

"Here we are," she announced. 

"And where is here?" Juno steadied herself against the grimy pale mauve wallpaper. 

"The bathroom, of course." 

A classic refuge of the cornered, Juno had to admit. There was no telling which one of them pushed the door open first, but into the bathroom they went, as if they were of a singular mind, suddenly on the same team despite both of their better inclinations. _Famous last words_ sloshed through her mind again, but she still closed the door behind them and locked it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ezra Pound tagging in for the chapter title today


End file.
